Frank Auerbach Catherine Lampert

Frank Auerbach Speaking and Painting

With 100 illustrations, 78 in colour Contents

Preface 6 1. Finding a Home in 10 2. Forging a Reputation 54 3. ‘Painting is My Form of Action’ 84 Frontispiece: Head of Julia, 1981 4. First published in the United Kingdom in 2015 by 118 Thames & Hudson Ltd, 181a High Holborn, wc1v 7qx The Best Game Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting 5. © 2015 Thames & Hudson Ltd, London Text © 2015 Catherine Lampert Idiom and Subject 166 Works by Frank Auerbach © 2015 Frank Auerbach

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, Conclusion 206 including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-0-500-23925-4

Printed and bound in China by Toppan Leefung Printing Limited Notes 216 • Selected Bibliography 227 To find out about all our publications, please visit www.thamesandhudson.com Chronology 229 • List of Illustrations 231 There you can subscribe to our e-newsletter, browse or download our current catalogue, and buy any titles that are in print. Permissions 234 • Acknowledgments 235 • Index 236 Chapter One Finding a Home in England

Berlin childhood Born on 29 April 1931, Frank Helmut Auerbach, an only child of older parents, recalls being coddled in a way that even at a young age felt suffocat- ing. This stemmed not only from the memory of being dressed in a blue velvet suit but also from the fact that his daily life was rather isolated from other children, with little freedom to play unwatched. The flat where he lived with his parents, Max Auerbach (b. 1890) and Charlotte Nora Borchardt Auerbach (b. 1902), was in a tall building with a large courtyard at 49 Güntzelstrasse in Wilmersdorf, a middle-class area of .1 A brass plate at the entrance announced his father’s name and credentials: he was a patent lawyer specializing in engineering and had his office at home. He had served in the army during the Great War and been awarded a medal of distinction. Pudgy and blond with glasses, Max Auerbach was descended from a long line of rabbis, including his father, Mannheim. Frank’s mother’s family, also Jewish, came from Lithuania; she was a dark-haired woman with a fine figure, although her jaw, like that of other Borchardts, protruded somewhat. Charlotte had studied art as a young woman and had been married before. The family lived in comfortable circumstances, milk and fresh rolls were delivered daily to the door. Frank’s parents seemed to get on, although his father was more relaxed and indulgent than his mother. ‘One of the few sort of tags of memories is of him buying a particular sort of bun for Frank drawing, Berlin, c. 1935 me and sitting opposite and seeming to take pleasure in the fact that I was

11 Frank with his mother, Charlotte, Berlin, c. 1931 Max Auerbach, the artist’s father, Berlin, c. 1932 Chapter One Finding a Home in England

greedily eating it.’ Objects on his large desk, especially a blotter and paper Landschulheim Herrlingen, near in south Germany in 1926. The punch, amused his son. Other recollections are telling, such as the gift of a teaching was informed by Essinger’s studies at American universities, and paint-box. ‘I remember vividly putting a wet brush for the first time onto a especially by her identification with Quaker principles. She embraced the cake of watercolour and I think one of my tricks, like you get a dog to roll educational philosophy known as Reformpädagogik whereby pupils and staff over, was that I did little drawings, and in my case they were of Red Indians were considered equal and everyone was responsible for the common good on scooters, which I was asked to draw. I can’t have been more than three of the school.5 By 1933, the pupils in Ulm were exclusively Jewish and, con- or four.’ 2 Among his books, Kai aus der Kiste (1926) by Wolf Durian was a cerned about the Nazi threat, Essinger transferred the school to England. favourite. It was ‘about a German boy who stowed away, in a wooden box, She rented, and later bought, a Georgian house, Bunce Court, near the for America. He had a great success in the States by devising ever more village of Lenham and not far from the town of Faversham in the North amazing advertising stunts.’ 3 In conversation, memories still occasionally Downs of Kent, where existing and new students were offered places. surface, as when I described going to the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in Unsurprisingly, the demand from Jewish families rapidly escalated as the 2013 to watch Kraftwerk perform. Mentioning their nostalgic song of 1974, Nazis’ racial laws tightened. Origo arranged with Essinger to sponsor six ‘Autobahn’, Auerbach commented that when one of the first sections of children to attend Bunce Court; those selected included Dr Altenberg’s the Berlin ring road opened in 1936, taking a drive was a popular diversion. nephew and niece, as well as Frank. The family stopped at the observatory just off the motorway, and the five- Auerbach’s parents had hoped the persecution of Jews would get no year-old impressed the grown-ups by coming out with the word ‘meteor’. worse, but facing the reality of the situation, they had acceded to Dr The rise of the Nazi party and the appointment of as Altenberg’s plan. Shortly before Frank’s eighth birthday they took him chancellor in January 1933 were a cause of anxiety and, already nervous to , where on 4 April 1939 he boarded the SS Washington in the by nature, Frank’s mother was fearful of the mounting anti-Semitism. On company of three people he had never met before: the Altenberg children, one occasion, when the nanny took Frank to the park, he was given a sweet Heinz and Ilse, and their nanny. The four shared a second-class cabin. This in the street and, hearing of this and alarmed that someone had been trying temporary home offered a rather special playroom on their deck with a to poison her son, his mother put him to bed so she could watch for tell-tale rocking horse; Frank remembers this and the stale odour on the ship. When signs. As time went on, the restrictions on Jews increased, particularly after it docked first at Le Havre, he saw, with horror, carcasses of meat covered the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 that defined who was in black flies hanging in the butchers’ shops. Arriving in Southampton, the Jewish, and when the licences of Jewish lawyers were revoked, the plate at group boarded a train to London and were met at Victoria station by the entrance had to be changed to ‘Max Auerbach, Engineering Graduate’. someone from Bunce Court, who took the children down to Kent; the Uncle Jakob, his father’s older brother, was also a lawyer. His partner, nanny returned to Germany. Frank’s suitcase contained his clothes and on Dr Altenberg, retired to Italy in 1938. There he met the wealthy Anglo- the larger garments his mother had stitched a red cross to indicate they American writer Iris Origo, who was to provide a lifeline for Frank. Iris, who were for later use; on items such as tablecloths and sheets intended for when had grown up in Fiesole, had married a minor Italian aristocrat, Antonio he was grown up, two red crosses had been sewn in a corner. Origo, in 1924 and the couple then devoted their lives to improving the poverty-stricken estate of La Foce that they bought in the Val d’Orcia in Bunce Court southeast Tuscany. Origo had started a school for the children of local The atmosphere at Bunce Court was unlike anything Frank had encoun- peasants, most of whom were illiterate.4 This led her to correspond with tered in his previous life, yet instead of feeling abandoned he felt curiously , a German Jewish educator who had opened her own school, at home, in the sense of liberated. Frank remembers being locked in a shed

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by two boys on his first afternoon, yet the experience ‘somehow didn’t depress me’. Later he got into a fight with another boy, and turned to a bystander to say, ‘I think I might get on a bit better if you cheered for me.’ His supporter, , three years older, became a friend and the two are still close. In the nine months from December 1938 to when the war started in September 1939 a number of the other pupils at the school arrived in Britain unaccompanied on the organized by the Refugee Children’s Movement and World Jewish Relief. 6 The student body was not exclusively Jewish, however. Bunce Court advertised in the New Statesman and other left-wing papers, and English couples, perhaps going through a divorce and finding it awkward to look after their children, might send them there. Bruce Bernard, later a friend and a remarkable photo editor, together with his brother Jeffrey, a famous journalist, attended the school in 1936–37. The staff, who were all devoted to the students, consisted mostly of refugees. Joined by British conscientious objectors once war broke out, they ranged from the unqualified to the overqualified. Essinger, known as Tante Anna, frightened many students, although a few, such as Roemer, were unruffled by her manner. After Frank had been at the school for about three weeks, the younger children were moved to the junior house, called Dane Court, a half-timbered Tudor building at Chilham, some ten miles from Bunce Court. The house-teacher was Gwynne Badsworth (later Angell), an attractive, sympathetic woman, who was 28 when Auerbach arrived. ‘She didn’t have any of this nonsense about not speaking English, so within three or four weeks we all were able to communicate in English. We were enrolled as Wolf Cubs or Brownies and did country dancing in the hall. And so, without any conscious effort we were anglicized.’ In an interview with a Kent newspaper shortly before her death in 2014, Badsworth recalled that ‘Every night I would read the little ones bedtime stories. I became a mother to them,’ and she remembered Frank as shy. 7 Auerbach agrees: ‘I was a rather quiet and nervous child … my respect for the way she dealt with the uprooted children has grown over the years.’ One of the memories of the school that Frank shared with Bruce Bernard was of being given baths by the lovely Badsworth. Bunce Court mirrored a kind of ‘real’, grown-up life, albeit in a place ‘a bit like a closed religious community’. There were ‘duties’ for all, such as Frank at Bunce Court, 1939

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scrubbing the kitchen floor or gardening, and the older boys were asked to finished and Tante Anna almost blind, Bunce Court closed in 1948. She died sift the coal to find big lumps that would stoke the boiler. Occasionally they in 1960 and the building was sold, but over time the school’s founder, teach- worked on neighbouring farms, digging up potatoes, and so forth. The dep- ers and students have become something of a legend. The memories of rivations of wartime rationing underpinned the austerity. The cook, Gretl alumni, many returning for reunions (although not Auerbach), have fed Heidt, called Heidtsche, was an amazingly competent German woman, articles that tend to focus on the nurturing effects of the teaching and on briefly interned as an enemy alien, who invariably provided nourishing and pupils who achieved public recognition. They include Leslie Baruch Brent, attractive meals. The students were fed six times a day, which for the older a distinguished immunologist; Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a foreign-policy expert children included a snack of dried fruit and cocoa before bedtime. known as Henry Kissinger’s Kissinger (his fixer); Harold Jackson, the Art was taught by the mathematics master and later by a pipe-smoking Guardian journalist and White House correspondent; and the musician and lady who worked with batik. Frank remembers ‘being stirred’ by a reproduc- humorist Gerard Hoffnung.9 Just three students remained friends of tion of J. M. W. Turner’s Fighting Temeraire in Arthur Mee’s The Children’s Frank’s. Frank Marcus, the theatre director known for his play The Killing Encyclopaedia and a poem on the opposite page. Later, when he was a bit of Sister George (1964), Michael Roemer, who went to America after leaving older and ill in bed, he pored over R. H. Wilenski’s Modern French Painters school and became a filmmaker – his (1964) was unusual (1939); the book served as a window to what Frank called ‘such a variety of at the time for having a cast of largely black actors – and the flautist styles’. Tante Anna had a Michelangelo print on the wall of her office and Rainer Schuelein. there were Brueghel reproductions over the dining tables, yet, as Auerbach By the early spring of 1943, when Frank was nearly 12, his parents’ recalls, the ambience was not art oriented: ‘You know, there are arty schools twenty-five word, censored letters, forwarded by the Red Cross, stopped where children are encouraged to express themselves – we weren’t encour- coming. At no point in the months that followed did he find himself ‘shocked aged to express ourselves, we were encouraged to be part of a community or overwhelmed; it was gradually leaked to me they were dead, taken to a and to have community spirit.’ 8 camp and killed’. Some of the Jewish residents of 49 Güntzelstrasse had In June 1940, as the threat of German invasion increased with the fall been moved temporarily to other addresses; in 1942–43 all were cleared. The of , the army requisitioned Bunce Court and many Germans over eventual deportation of twenty-one residents is now commemorated by the age of 16 living in Britain were interned. Tante Anna had to find replace- Stolpersteine, brass plaques set in the pavement outside the front doors of ment premises, and after a three-day search secured Trench Hall in , the last residence of choice of victims of the Holocaust. The birth dates Shropshire. This house where Frank lived for five years has stayed in his identify them as adults and along with the Auerbachs the names include memory; it was grand enough to have a circular drive and a ha-ha, and inside Elise Bloch, Erika Blum, Leopold Cohn, Emma Friedländer, Carl Stern, a green baize door divided the living area from the servants’ quarters where Georg Stodola, and couples such as Siegfried and Lucie Zehden, all of whom bells once summoned staff to the various rooms. When he became an ‘older’ died in Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, or other locations in the east. Charlotte boy, Auerbach slept in the stables, which were fitted out with five bunk beds and Max Auerbach were deported in early March 1943 aboard a transport in two rows with a stove between. He and his lively Polish girlfriend, Peppi to Auschwitz; the date of Charlotte’s death is given as 30 June 1943, Max’s Unger, contrived to meet at night in adjacent barns; after they received as simply 1943.10 their School Certificates in the summer of 1945, she left for London. Later Auerbach has never enquired about what happened to his parents in Peppi emigrated to Israel and married, but for many years she kept in touch. the final year and last months. I think of parallels to Vikram Seth’s intimate Once the war was over, the school returned to its former premises in and respectful book Two Lives (2005), the story of his Indian Uncle Shanti Kent. However, the situation was different and, with its refugee function and his German wife Aunt Henny, whose family, like the Auerbachs, were

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also assimilated Jews. Henny had escaped to London before the war with Marckwald worked with the school theatre group in a very thorough help from her fiancé’s father, leaving behind in Berlin her mother and sister.11 way; there were rehearsals every afternoon for months. ‘We did Twelfth Seth takes us through the oppression that goes with the restrictive laws and Night. But it wasn’t a school play in the usual sense. We worked over each persecution of Jews as they are banned from public transport, subject to theme and by the time we had finished rehearsing we hadn’t got to the point curfew, and more and more confined to the homes that are steadily confis- where Fabian [Frank’s part] enters – so that was that. But the next play was cated. When he seeks material in the archive at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem Everyman, which isn’t a long play, and we managed to do the whole thing, about Henny’s mother and sister, Gabriele and Lola Caro, he finds evidence and I was Everyman. I remember a rather heady moment. We worked in the older woman was taken to Theresienstadt. On a list compiled with this man’s painstaking way to get everything right and to understand. Then ‘methodical categorization of special circumstances’ there are also notes we came to a point where Everyman finally realizes how wrong his life of those who, like Max Auerbach, received medals for military service has been, and says: “I will make my testament Here before you all present.” during the First World War, which might have delayed their deportation. This speech hadn’t been rehearsed. And I did it, it was only about eight lines, Lola, born in 1907, is one of four hundred people sent in May 1943 on an and he [Marckwald] said: “Sometimes one does get it right without the Osttransport (East-transport) straight to Auschwitz-Birkenau. After the war, rehearsal.” I think, because of all the training, I had perhaps managed to when Henny learnt details about the fate of her mother and sister, she make some sense of it.’ 14 wrote candidly to a friend: ‘you can imagine how sad, how unendingly sor- With hindsight, the story reads like a blueprint for creating something rowful I am, and I will never get over it. Sometimes I am so overcome that unforeseen that is rigorously true: the repeated study of the script, the I don’t think I can go on.’ 12 striving to get things right and then the moment of abandon. There is a Frank, for his part, concedes: ‘I think I did this thing which psychia- remote analogy with painting one subject for many months and years: as trists frown on: I am in total denial. It’s worked very well for me. To be quite the person moves around during breaks, Auerbach might begin to see other honest I came to England and went to a marvellous school, and it truly was things that wait to be portrayed; as he repeatedly draws outdoors from a a happy time. There’s just never been a point in my life when I felt I wish fixed position, he gathers information and atmosphere. While painting, all I had parents.’ 13 of Auerbach’s energies are engaged with the formal and ‘truthful’ possibili- On the other hand, there were teachers whose high standards and ties that have arisen, as he does nothing but observe and paint; for several empathy made a lasting impression on Frank, offering guidance and hours he is immersed in the effort of making a unity of the forms. The comfort, as they did for other Bunce Court students. For him, the most analogy to acting goes further. ‘What I have in my mind is, as it were, the significant was Wilhelm Marckwald, who had acted, directed and produced lump of the subject, the three-dimensional entity which I somehow try to plays in the late 1920s and early 1930s at the Stadttheater Koblenz and the inhabit and become – in the way that an actor would don a character or Deutsches Theater Berlin. Fleeing Germany in 1933, he went to Barcelona become a part – and to make statements about it from inside.’ 15 where he made films, but left Spain at the outset of the Civil War in 1936 and had an emigré existence in Sweden and France before arriving at Trench Moving to London Hall in 1942. There he was employed as the boilerman and gardener and, Towards the end of the war Auerbach stayed in London with his much more significantly, directed the school plays. Pilar, his Spanish wife, was older cousin Gerda from his father’s side and her husband, Gerd Boehm, very pretty, short and good humoured, and students remember her in the for part of the holidays, burying himself in books borrowed from the library kitchen needing to stand on a stool to stir the porridge. on Keats Grove in Hampstead; during the rest of the time he remained at Bunce Court. Leaving there in the summer of 1947 with his Higher School

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Certificate and a document of naturalization, which he received on 16 July a former member of the ITG, placed the company in a historical context, 1947 in Faversham, he was absolutely determined not to end up in an office explaining that Marcus had ‘challenged the dogmatic hierarchy of Unity or a bank. Without Latin his choice of university was limited, but no advice Theatre and broken away’.18 O’Connor helped to convince the others that or effort was made to place him where he thought he might thrive – in an it was a good thing that someone with contacts, Marcus, was willing to art or drama school. take on the responsibility of being director. Marcus began by ‘introducing A few surviving relatives were able to offer a bit of support for the to the company a retiring young painter called Frank Auerbach … He also 16-year-old orphan. His Uncle Jakob, who had escaped Berlin through the played Pantalone and used the stage name of Frank Ashley in The Servant of Netherlands and arrived in London after the war, his mother’s brother Two Masters by Goldoni. He would do the decor. We would be on a sharing Uncle Hans Borchardt, who had fled to Buenos Aires, and cousins living basis, also using serious drama students.’ 19 in the United States joined together to provide a stipend of £4. 10s. a week One venue they had an opportunity to use was the Torch Theatre on for a year or so. Moving into a room in Pond Street in Hampstead, which Wilton Place in Knightsbridge. Although it seated less than one hundred, he shared with Schuelein, who had left Bunce Court at the same time, it was a fully professional theatre and was known as a ‘shop window’ to the Auerbach enrolled in art classes at the Hampstead Garden Suburb Institute. West End. A small bar at the top of the stairs served as a club; Auerbach Despite the teaching seeming rather amateur, the instruction in how to remembers seeing the actors Michael Wilding and Laurence Harvey handle materials proved quite useful. ‘There was Mr Oliver, a calligrapher. around. In the evening various groups performed their plays, some featuring He did the lettering for the Stalingrad Sword, and he not only taught callig- members of the cast of the wildly popular BBC radio programme ‘Dick raphy but also employed students as calligraphers to do memorial books for Barton – Special Agent’. In 1948, most likely in September as O’Connor churches and chapels – for which, of course, there was a big demand after remembers coming there at the end of a summer-long heatwave, they began the war.’ 16 Auerbach proved too clumsy for this task: ‘I think they regarded rehearsing ’s play House of Regrets (1940). Frank’s role as me as far too rough, foreign, modernistic, incompetent and hopeless.’ Strukhov, the elderly batman to the even older General Andrei Cherevenko, At Bunce Court he had tried out a few ‘modern’ idioms, that of Paul was rather testing. In spite of having only a few lines, he was required to be Klee being the easiest to master. Now, he read James Frazer’s The Golden on stage a lot of the time, waiting to say, ‘Dostoievsky writes very clearly … Bough (1890) with the idea of attempting mythological subjects; Frank’s I find that he frequently makes people speak who live so clearly that I often versions imagined a penny on the eyes of a dead man, and sailors who tied feel that they might walk in through the door.’ 20 The rehearsals went on knots in sails so they could be let out if becalmed. He made a Crucifixion so long Frank sometimes slept in the theatre at night, under the seats. Most scene in the style of Edward Burra. In the summer holiday of 1948 Frank significantly, this was where he met Estella West, another member of the returned to Bunce Court and painted a picture a day. A few staff remained cast, who was to become a vital part of his life. and ‘no one had the heart to say to me what right have you got to be here, Auerbach also acted in plays at the 20th Century Theatre in or told me I couldn’t stay there. It was really home and gave me as much Westbourne Grove and at the New Lindsey in Notting Hill. These were confidence as a family would have done.’ 17 proper fringe theatres, and although the activity for this young student was Apart from wanting to make art, there were opportunities to con- an evening one, he remembers that ‘the people I worked with were almost tinue acting. Two school friends, Frank Marcus and Herman Essinger, all trained actors’. He joined the Tavistock Theatre in Islington for a short a nephew of Tante Anna, had joined the International Theatre Group, while and had a couple of minor parts, one in Beggar on Horseback by George which was the Kensington branch of the left-wing Unity Theatre based F. Kaufman and Marc Connelly: ‘I think that was because when I filled in in St Pancras. Writing in the London Magazine in 2000, Patrick O’Connor, the form, I said I could do an American accent – which was stretching it a

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bit.’ On another occasion, Auerbach answered an ad in the Stage and went (1914), was a painting based on what he remembered of Schevzik’s Steam to Ireland for a week to work for a stock company until he was sent back Baths in the East End of London, in which the figures were reduced to blue on account of having a foreign accent and resisting the advances of the and white angular forms apparently climbing in and out of a red basin. actor-manager. Bomberg was, for Auerbach, ‘by far the most talented of people who The subsequent plays Marcus directed with the ITG cast notable actors, worked in that neo-Cubist idiom’. Nonetheless, he later became ‘an and attracted sought-after critics, including Beverley Baxter, who was in extremely adept landscape painter of very, very topographical landscapes the audience when they were playing at the Chepstow Theatre in Notting – marvellously done in Palestine in the twenties. So this wasn’t a man who Hill. O’Connor recalled that Baxter’s ‘presence was due mainly to the mach- had some sort of single mission.’ 22 inations of Jacqueline Sylvester [who later married Marcus], sister of [the Mr Patrick put together a timetable for Frank. ‘I think I’ll put you in aspiring art critic] David. She had erupted into one of our readings, a wild for a day with ’, as if to say, ‘Well, Bomberg’s a bit dicey, but gamine look about her, hilarious after a party, dressed like a gypsy, her black you never know – you might get on with him.’ 23 Bomberg had caused con- hair disarranged, delivering bon mots to right and to left. Deflating the more troversy while he was still a student at the Slade in 1911–13. Although proud pompous members, she was the Anna Magnani we lacked, winning all our to have made a copy from a Holbein early on, he eventually reacted against hearts. We cast her as the vociferous hoyden in The Broken Jug.’ 21 both what was taught there and the emphasis on winning prizes for draughts- manship. He was thrown out for his rebelliousness; the Slade was perhaps The example of David Bomberg worried that his attitude would spread. While Frank concedes that Bomberg At the beginning of 1948, the artist Archibald Ziegler, whose wife had been was ‘difficult’, and that ‘what he taught wouldn’t have equipped any of us a teacher at Bunce Court in the 1930s, arranged for Auerbach to have an to pass any exam, and there used to be art exams … He had this sort of idiom interview with the principal of St Martin’s School of Art. He was accepted that allowed one to go for the essence at the very beginning … it was an for September, but impatient to begin studying art at a place more challeng- experimental journey and this was not what was taught in art schools.’ 24 ing than the Hampstead Garden Suburb Institute, Frank walked around Bomberg’s life class occupied a former engineering workshop, which other London art schools with his portfolio under his arm. Arriving at the Auerbach vividly recalls: ‘It had vastly high ceilings, tiled walls, and a Borough Polytechnic Institute located on Southwark Bridge Road, he met curious metal structure holding up various skylights and angles in the Mr Patrick, the principal of the art school, a cake designer and a kind man, roof; and a door that, when you opened it, kept on swinging like a bar door who agreed to admit him immediately. Founded in 1892, the college had a in a Western saloon for about five minutes after you’d entered.’ 25 Bomberg mixture of part-time and full-time students who crossed generations and taught one day and two evening classes. Auerbach remembers that in the classes; many had been in the Forces and were, as Auerbach put it, ‘actually day session there was a Polish girl who painted waves for months on end serious about life’. In keeping with the postwar mood of egalitarianism, and scraped off what she did with a circular tool. There were two other here and elsewhere, there was a feeling that everyone had the right to an Polish girls who were very giggly and three former GIs who focused on education. As well as its mainstay trade courses, the Borough Polytechnic picking up girls. A more serious student was Richard Negri, who was had a good reputation for art and employed, for example, the designer Tom studying stage design and went on to a distinguished career at the Royal Eckersley and the painter David Bomberg as teachers. Court and in Manchester, as well as becoming a teacher at Wimbledon Bomberg had established his reputation as an artist associated with School of Art. the Vorticists (who in turn were close in their modernist idiom to the In the first term, Auerbach was asked to square up a part of a drawing Cubists and Futurists). One of Bomberg’s early masterpieces, The Mud Bath and to enlarge that area. His offended expression (now he regards the

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exercise as a very intelligent one) led Bomberg to ask, ‘“Oh, so you think I’m a silly old idiot don’t you’, or something like that, and I said, in my 17-year- old arrogance, “Yes, I do”. He was delighted and I didn’t realize that I had met with probably the most original, stubborn, radical intelligence that was to be found in art school … For me, very few works that could be described as works of art were produced there, but anything that seemed artificial or concocted or sort of false sauce or gravy on an insufficiently vital fact would be rejected by Bomberg. On the other hand, something which contained simply the tiniest hint of a personal distinction, it might be accepted. The result was that people would produce these anonymous cloudy pieces of paper which had absolutely nothing cheap or nasty about them and which would, to the sympathetic eye, have an adumbration of something rather grand and organic and particular. But, in competition with the great paint- ings of the world, which also have a vitality of a cutting image like superb posters, these drawings would seem like defenceless molluscs’.26 Rather than instruct young people as if they were mere students, part of Bomberg’s message was that if ‘what you’re doing is to have any validity at all; it’s going to be on the level of these Masters that we admire’. Auerbach remembers looking at a reproduction of El Greco’s View of Toledo (1629) and Bomberg explaining how the scene was inaccurate compared to what Auerbach regards as his teacher’s equally thrilling, more descriptive approach to depicting the same town. It never occurred to Bomberg to suggest a subject as he assumed every- one had one. For him, it was necessary for artists whatever their age to be determined and ambitious. Students tended to draw in charcoal on large sheets and paint with large brushes; the same model continued to pose for an entire day or evening (contrary to the practice of short poses in other classes). Bomberg’s ability to demonstrate something to a student by paint- ing or drawing rapidly and with great facility on the work in progress was breathtaking and formidable. ‘He came up behind you and said, look at the model, it’s doing this, it’s doing that – I suggest this and so on. So it was a practical course of instruction which actually took up most of the time.’ 27 At the London County Council (LCC) ‘Open-Air Exhibition’ in the Frank at the LCC ‘Open-Air Exhibition’, Embankment Gardens, summer of 1948, Auerbach decided to try selling works by hanging his own London, July 1948 pictures on the railings of Victoria Embankment Gardens, not far from

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where the much more mature ’s were showing. The impetus believe in modelling the thing up artificially to give it weight. Weight was for that group, which included , Peter (also known as Miles) something you felt.’ 30 Such an intuitive, explorative approach made refer- Richmond, Len Missen, and , derived from ence to Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy of seeing. Writing in the eighteenth these older students. They formulated manifestos and showed together, century, Berkeley maintained that sight is connected with the experience so there was a certain doctrinaire tendency within the art school. As Frank of the physical world gained by experimentation with touch and the other observed later: ‘Like every religious order, I suppose, like every innovative senses. Auerbach paraphrases Berkeley’s ideas as follows: ‘If you have a spoon movement in art and ideas, what was actually an improvised, energetic, and you look at its back, on the convex side, you get your image. If you look fresh leap into the unknown has been turned into orthodoxy by followers.’ 28 at the front, the concave side, you get your image upside down. Exactly the Neither Auerbach nor , who from 1949 attended Bomberg’s same thing happens to the retina: on the back of the retina we get a reverse evening classes, became members of the Borough Group, or any movement; image, so that the newborn infant will reach down for something that’s up it was the contact with Bomberg and the freedom to work from the model and up for something that’s down. It’s only by crawling across the floor, outside the conventions of art school life-rooms that brought them to touching things, judging distances haptically, that the child will relate the south London. sight of what he sees to the physical world.’ This process transfers to the Another very independent-minded student of Bomberg’s, also a artist in the studio who comes to understand the architecture of a building refugee from , was Gustav Metzger. Born in 1926, Metzger or a person and in a rather mysterious way ingests the whole. Looking back, was conditioned by disturbing images from childhood. ‘My parents lived Auerbach concludes that what Bomberg meant by ‘the spirit of the mass’ just off the main road between Furth and Nuremberg. Thousands of people was to do with adding to the sense of three-dimensional architecture some- would march along that road to the Nazi rallies. I was frightened.’ 29 In 1948, thing very particular and exact. As he puts it: ‘You find yourself making one of Metzger’s paintings, an oil on metal, was shown with the artist’s gestures that imply legs and breast and so on; you begin to imply a sense of collective, the London Group. Auerbach recalls the forms, looking like mass on the paper or on the canvas simply because you felt it.’ three eggs, a bit like one of Robert Motherwell’s elegies to the Spanish In 1986, when the New York-based critic and historian Republic. Later, Metzger eschewed painting and brought in anti-establish- was preparing a monograph on Auerbach, the artist extended the compari- ment ideas. In the 1960s, as an advocate of the auto-destructive movement, son of Bomberg and Berkeley to F. R. Leavis, the Cambridge academic who his application of acid to painted nylon during performances was intended insisted that literature came from an indwelt identification with words to mirror the arms industry’s obsession with obliteration via nuclear and experience rather than from learnt concepts. ‘You can tell a piece of weapons. Themes that surface in Metzger’s later installation work, particu- Leavis, with its peculiar grinding cack-handedness and heaviness of syntax, larly the materiality of nature and a desire to provoke a visceral experience almost anywhere – partly because he was chewing out his own definitions.’ on the part of the spectator, perhaps relate to what both he and Auerbach Auerbach went on to say that Bomberg’s conversation naturally seemed took away from Bomberg’s own traumatic experience as a soldier in the ‘fairly impenetrable to outsiders unless they had patience with him or, as trenches in 1914–16, in particular their mentor’s insistence on working from in my case, were young enough to have become habituated to it. He spoke life and rejecting style. on his own terms, and didn’t take anything over from other people without The rhetorical side of Bomberg’s teaching is associated in most examining and remaking it.’ 31 Frank drew a series of simplified diagrams of accounts by students and art historians with a particular phrase, ‘the spirit birds to illustrate his point. ‘If you have two lines that represent a bird’s of the mass’, but taken out of context it can be misleading. It was intended mouth, you could do a thousand drawings on a piece of paper and each of to describe the subject as a three-dimensional entity; Bomberg ‘didn’t these birds would have a different expression. That one is obviously a more

28 29 Chapter One Finding a Home in England

jokey bird than the others, and so on. Well, in that sense, this being the sim- one sees a stranger naked and draws her, well, although I think it’s the only plest possible combination of directions, there’s only one exact and direct training-ground, it doesn’t seem to me to be the situation in which one expression for yourself of the mass in front of you. There are a million ways makes an image’.36 of not getting it right … you’re most likely to get it right when you’re least self-conscious, when you’ve given up any hope of producing an acceptable St Martin’s School of Art, 1948–52 drawing or painting … because then you’re permeated wordlessly by the Auerbach acquired a copy of Alfred H. Barr, Jr.’s monograph on Picasso soon influence of the thing you’re painting.’ 32 after it was published in 1946, and it was, and has remained, a stimulating Robert Hughes regarded Bomberg as an exemplar for Frank and in his source. While working he kept the page open at various pictures then cap- book (published in 1990) he outlined some of the qualities and positions tioned Head (Femme au nez en quart de Brie), 1907, and the Girl with Dark Hair that link Auerbach to his first real teacher: ‘much of the younger man – (Portrait of D.M.), 1939. ‘It seemed to present the artist as an extraordinary his empiricism, his scorn for modernist conventions, his impatience with fertile conjuror. I think I once thought I was that sort, wanted to be that theory and ideology, his reverence for the past and his determination to sort, of artist; it was only in the act of working that I discovered I wasn’t paint as though there were no breach between it and the present – was that kind of painter at all.’ 37 But, what seems self-effacing can be misleading. there in the older.’ 33 Perhaps the most important conviction they shared For example, in the exhibition of the wartime works by Pablo Picasso and was that, in Auerbach’s words, ‘visual art is made with resistant matter and Henri Matisse that opened at the Victoria & Albert Museum in December comes up against awkward rebarbative obstacles’.34 Auerbach explained 1945, one of the paintings there, Picasso’s Woman with Green Dress (Femme en to Hughes that Bomberg’s insistence on never borrowing anything from vert), 1943, still looks relevant to Auerbach’s art. The strong rhythmic defini- others without examining it and remaking it for oneself also made a deep tion of the seated figure and the quirky spiral patterning within her dress impression, but ‘the deep necessity that I have to actually get profoundly is reminiscent of the bold drawing with liquid paint and the moment of involved with the subject is something I certainly didn’t learn from lightness that sometimes guides much later work by Auerbach, as well as Bomberg. He often painted things that meant a great deal to him. But the triangular or loopy cipher inserted into a portrait and the skewed a large part of the time he was like a tourist painter. He would move from posture that is factual.38 place to place, paint the landscapes where he saw them, and be able to make In the summer of 1948, before entering St Martin’s, Auerbach went to original and profoundly stated images with a subtext of philosophical Paris for a few days with his cousin Gerda Boehm and he returned there enquiry and grandeur.’ 35 briefly in c. 1951 with three other St Martin’s students. He found himself In his interview with Hughes, Auerbach also placed emphasis on the disappointed on both occasions by the works on display, for example, at the difference between working from a model in a class and doing so on one’s Maison de la pensée française, Picasso’s owls and kitchens, by Matisse’s cut- own. ‘There was an idea of quality and lack of fear in those classes, but outs at the Musée d’art moderne, which he didn’t rate – then, rather than their actual productions and the mere fact that they were the productions now – and by weak works from the Ecole de Paris, such as those of André of a life-class, which has always seemed to me to be an artificial situation Lhote. In comparison, walking around London galleries was definitely excit- unless it’s acknowledged in its artificiality, made them, for me, fall short of ing and Auerbach took a keen, temporary interest in an exhibition of Ivon any sort of ambition that I would have. I think I really only found what I Hitchens’s paintings at the Leicester Galleries. The was wanted to do when I recorded something that was intimate enough to me in close proximity to St Martin’s and he began making drawings there on a to be worth recording,’ and, having in his mind equally impersonal classes regular basis (and continued to do so until the 1980s when the bus service at the next two art colleges he attended, he continued, ‘a life-class where deteriorated and consulting the old masters no longer seemed relevant).

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Auerbach was supported by a LCC grant of £120 a year, and, as he was only 17, was still entitled to free milk. The St Martin’s course was closely tied to exams, which were linked to prescribed exercises, such as accom- plishing a drawing in a day and a life-painting in a week, and at the end the successful students were awarded a National Diploma in Design. The Borough Polytechnic course had given Auerbach limited exposure to illus- tration, poster design and clay modelling in the courses taught by various instructors other than Bomberg. At St Martin’s in the beginners’ (first) year there was antique drawing, costume, art history and various other related subjects, as well as life drawing, and in the intermediate (or second) year they took life and costume drawing, composition, art history, architecture, perspective and anatomy. Building on those broad foundations, students in the third and fourth years studied life painting, pictorial composition, methods and materials, and submitted a short ‘thesis’. Teachers had some leeway in how they taught; for example, in the first year Clifford Webb took the students to the London Zoo in the mornings to draw and asked them to paint from what they brought back in the afternoons (Frank remembers painting a tiger, a rhinoceros and a fruit bat). John Wheatley, a Royal Academician who trained at the Slade, gave a lecture on every year as part of his methods and materi- als course. Auerbach reflects that ‘I was not particularly interested then, but in retrospect, the account by Wheatley, who had been his student, of Sickert’s routine is intriguing. He worked on his paintings in sequence (perhaps thirty), all numbered on the back, over perhaps many months, drawing in the evenings. When a painting was finished, he started another from his stock of squared-up drawings. Of course, Sickert was volatile and often changed his ideas and his way of working.’ Frank resisted the idea of painting genre scenes or narratives: ‘When I was a student many of the students around me were doing paintings of nudes on iron bedsteads [à la Sickert], and I thought of that as a cosy, domestic let-out. My vision of painting, the picture I had in my head, was of some clearly formal statement; an explosion; and I thought there was something too domestic and whimsical and Impressionistic about Sickert. I remember reacting with considerable scepticism when Helen [Lessore] pablo picasso, Girl with Dark Hair (Portrait of Dora Maar), 1939, in Frank’s said he was the best.’ 39 More than his painting, Sickert’s critical essays, copy of Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art (1946) by Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

32 Finding a Home in England

published as A Free House! (1947), and later the collected writings, became and have remained a great stimulus. ‘I read his writings when I was a student. They worried me; I didn’t think it proper to be reading them … perhaps one should be reading Apollinaire instead? But his energy and wit, and the optimism, and the considerable profundity in odd places just got through to me. I loved the book and I still do. When I find myself very tired of an afternoon I sometimes pick that book up and go to a page and read it, and I find it works for me – I just want to go on working. It’s a matter of the man’s all-round worth.’ 40 The 1948 intake at St Martin’s was comprised of an unusually large number of students who became well-known artists: among others, , , Jack Smith, Peter Kinley, Bernard Cohen, Peter Coker, Michael Fussell, Anthony Hill and . Again, their backgrounds were diverse. Tilson, for example, had come up from the suburbs, trained as a carpenter, worked in the building trade and had done his National Service in the RAF. He arrived for classes at St Martin’s on a motor scooter with a blonde girlfriend and knew about life. Auerbach’s relationship with Leon Kossoff began when they met at St Martin’s. Leon, Phil Holmes and Frank went around as a kind of trio. When feeling a bit flush, they ate upstairs at Shearns, a vegetarian restaurant and health-food shop in Tottenham Court Road. On occasion they watched T. S. Eliot, a poet they much admired, poke a camembert before buying it. Kossoff, who was to become one of the important painters of his gen- eration, was born in London in December 1926. He had attended St Martin’s during the war, then spent the years 1945–48 in the Royal Fusiliers attached to 2nd Battalion Jewish Brigade before re-enrolling at St Martin’s in 1949. One day, Kossoff expressed his admiration for a drawing Auerbach was doing in the antique room and not long afterwards the younger student suggested that Bomberg’s class, which he was still attending in the evenings, might suit him. Kossoff came along and the two became close, having in common a resistance to compromise and a more rebellious temperament than the other students; Kossoff found it impossible to conform to the exam requirements. Looking back, Auerbach explains that compared to him Kossoff had a much clearer sense of who he was and what he wanted to Portrait of Leon Kossoff, 1950 achieve in his work. In 1949, Kossoff made a painting of a coal man, in

35 Finding a Home in England

the days when they still used horses. It stays in Auerbach’s mind as being exceptionally raw and large-scaled; when the intermediate-year composi- tions ‘were meant to be 15 × 22 in., this was 20 × 30’. They began to pose for each other over the Christmas holidays in 1950–51, initially in a room Auerbach took in Palace Gardens Terrace, Kensington. There are two fin- ished charcoal drawings by Auerbach from this period. In the summer holidays they went to draw on Hampstead Heath. Auerbach found he was doing one sort of drawing at St Martin’s and another in Bomberg’s classes. However, this is now hard to judge since most paintings and drawings made while he was student were destroyed and those that survive are undated. Auerbach points out that for Birth, Marriage, Death (1949), a triptych 4 × 6 feet made while at St Martin’s, he used his own body for some of the figures, as well as drawing a girlfriend called Lesley. Other group scenes still exist: All Night Party 1 (1950) and Three Blind Men (1951). Drawings and paintings done in Bomberg’s evening class, as Auerbach once recalled, were ‘quite remarkably like some of those pictures produced in New York at about the same time, also by painters working in total obscurity. Nobody at the Borough Polytechnic knew about the American painters.’ In preparation for this book, I asked Frank what might have hap- pened if he had emigrated to the United States and his first contact with professional artists had been at Hans Hofmann’s School of Fine Art at 52 W. 8th Street in New York. His reply was, ‘It would have definitely made a dif- ference. There is a certain sympathy between the way Hofmann’s students painted – that is, of finding the very lively formal essence of the material – and the way Bomberg’s students thought. It is true Bomberg’s teaching was closer to Hofmann’s than, for instance, what Albers taught, which might suit some people.’ From Auerbach’s perspective, Josef Albers, another native of Germany, who taught at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, from 1933, and later at , operated in a rather different area, abiding by a consistent ‘schema’, which from 1951 was his homage to a square, and this kind of established system reassured his followers. Frank went on to say, using as comparison his own experience as a visiting tutor, ‘Painting can’t really be taught. All you can do is get people to where they jump in and swim. Hofmann had his own language, push Three Blind Men, 1951 and pull, which meant something specific to those in his classes. Bomberg

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had his own language which meant something specific to the people in his class. People hope to get students to the point where they can involve themselves in the painting, which is what people at the beginning can’t do, and so they find more extreme and recondite ways of entering the formal content of the painting.’

A breakthrough, summer, 1952 ‘I remember the breakthrough, the point at which it seemed to me that I started making my own pictures. It’s very vivid, very specific, in the summer of 1952.’ These paintings that Auerbach claims are true to the subject were provoked by a feeling of crisis. ‘I’d been in institutions for five years, which seemed a century to me. I felt I would be doomed if I went into the army. I also felt I would be doomed if I went to the Royal College and just became an art student for another three years.’ 41 That summer, to his relief, he managed to fail the army medical, which meant he was excused from doing National Service. Meanwhile, he had a good job helping a girlfriend of Phil Holmes’s who ran a bagatelle stall at Battersea funfair, where he was paid 30 shillings a day by the boss and 30 shillings by her out of the fiddling. Frank was copying drawings of bicycles from a British catalogue, placing three to a page, so that his employer, a Nigerian, could duplicate them and offer the bikes to clients in his home country. He did this from four to six in the morning in order to have the rest of the time free for painting. It was then that ‘two things happened’. He was working from Stella (Estella Olive West, or E.O.W.) and she was someone he was involved with, not a professional model, ‘so the whole situation was obviously more tense and fraught. There was always the feeling that she might get fed up, that there might be a quarrel or something. I also had a much greater sense of what specifically she was like, so that the question of getting a likeness was like walking a tightrope. I had a far more poignant sense of it slipping away, of it being hard to get. I’d done the painting for some sittings in a relatively timid way; that is, I’d tried to do one part and then another part, and save a bit. Then I suddenly found in myself enough courage to repaint the whole thing, from top to bottom, irrationally and instinctively, and I found I’d got a picture of her.’ 42 The nude of E.O.W. does not appear conventionally resolved, one of her legs is tiny and the other big. ‘It only seems an authentic E.O.W. Nude, 1952

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invention when I know that, however nutty it might look to someone else, that it is actually true, for me.’ The second and parallel act of desperation and epiphany transformed a building site that Auerbach passed regularly on Earl’s Court Road. ‘I went on doing drawings and trying to do this painting all summer, determined not to compromise.’ 43 Arriving at the in September, his sense of doubt about whether he should have enrolled to do an advanced degree was heightened when the new class was allocated six tubes of colour; it seemed ridiculously inadequate, even then when everything was rationed: ‘I felt so disgusted entering an institution again, becoming a student again, thinking that I would have to conform in some way and compromise again … I went home and in my anger finished the Earl’s Court Road painting. Again, because of a crisis.’ Our eye is led to the ladders, girders and construc- tion workers, but it is the intensified sense of space and movement imparted by Auerbach’s resort to amplifying some things and diminishing others, together with his use of bold, oblique strokes and orange and green blocks, that turn the street scene into a radical painting.

The Royal College of Art, 1952–55 The professor of painting at the Royal College was Rodrigo Moynihan, an artist who was part of the objective abstraction group in the 1930s and had returned to figuration when teaching at the Euston Road School. The first-year tutor was John Minton, who came over to Frank and said, ‘You look as though you know what you’re doing, I’ll leave you alone.’ Auerbach recalls him as nice, and a painter who made more authentic work than his ‘neo-romantic’ associates. At the Royal College there were departments of illustration, furniture, stained glass and so forth. The fine-art course was not unlike that of the Slade, which was the other highly regarded college and a place Auerbach had thought of attending (he was accepted, but was wary of going to a school where the students seemed rather too sophisticated and genteel).44 The atmosphere was less ‘bohemian’ and intellectual than the Slade, more down to earth, which is not to say that some of the painting students were not daring, extreme and inventive. In both colleges emphasis was put on drawing Summer Building Site, 1952 in the life-room, indeed, , professor at the Slade since

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the summer of 1949, had known Moynihan since their student days and the two spoke every day. Francis Bacon and David Sylvester were visitors to both institutions and the students met each other in pubs and at exhibitions. Minton tolerated Frank’s procedure of drawing from the model in the mornings, then returning home to do his painting. Once or twice in the life- room ‘I told people to keep quiet because it seemed to me to be intolerable that people should talk in the room where one was trying to work.’ One of his contemporaries at the college was , and she recalls that they were the only students who persisted over the three weeks during which a particular model posed (Frank stood to work; she used a donkey easel to sit and balance her drawing board). The principal, Robin Darwin, suggested that Frank and Kossoff (he arrived at the RCA in 1953), who were known to be close, paint in the studios at the college instead of where they lived. But, after a brief compliance with Darwin’s directive, they carried on as before. Prior to 1954, the room Auerbach rented for the longest time was at 69 Anselm Road in West Kensington, near the North End Road. It cost 27s. 6d. a week. The location of Building Site, Earl’s Court Road, Winter (1953) was not far from where he lived, and in retrospect that picture is also associ- ated in Auerbach’s mind with moving beyond a student’s viewpoint and doing something more original. He arranged a saw, pincers and hammer in his room in the hope that shifting from doing drawings to a painting of this still-life grouping would help with the challenge of doing the same when faced with the ever-changing scene of men, angular steel elements and mounds of earth. ‘It seemed to me that certain pictures that I had admired had done this and that the conflict between the slight sheerness and bland- ness that comes in working from drawings and the awkwardness and oddity that the objects in front of one have might make a more convincing image.’ 45 In a BBC radio interview in 2001, the journalist John Tusa asked Auerbach what he would say to a young artist starting out from art school and the answer pointed to the winter building-site work. It was important to begin with ‘some experience that is your own and to try and record it in an idiom that is your own, and not to give a damn about what anybody else says to you … I think that the key word there is subject – find out what matters most to you and pursue it.’ 46 He has observed that ‘style’ is a sort of subject, a statement of your interests. This building-site painting seems to Seated Nude, 1955

42 Finding a Home in England

him ‘to be a sort of remarkable object, and though nobody else may be aware of it, I am aware of the amount of painting experience that’s buried under those heavy lumps of black and white and ochre.’ 47 Francis Bacon, without a secure studio, had occupied one at the RCA in 1950, then returned in 1952 when Moynihan lent him his own, which was the professor’s room at the college. In his first year Auerbach became aware of this figure in a stylish French mariner’s shirt, like those worn by sailors. By eleven o’clock the shirt was covered in paint stains. Bacon would some- times briefly visit the students’ sketching club and comment on what he saw. Born in 1909, he had only become established as a painter with the triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (c. 1944), shown in 1948, and through the remarkable exhibitions of his work at the Hanover Gallery. At the opening in December 1951, Auerbach thought the Pope paintings looked impressive because they were more painterly than the somewhat graphic run of English contemporary art, which he regarded as illustrative. Looking back in c. 1990, Michael Andrews, a Slade student who in the mid-1950s became a friend of Auerbach and Bacon, wrote: ‘The supremely significant thing as far as I was concerned about Francis’s pictures, when I first became familiar with them as a Slade student in 1949–53, was that they were of mature adults, responsible, culpable, cor- ruptible, vulnerable men, and occasionally women – not boys and girls. And that together with the fact that if they had no clothes on, what was remarkable was nakedness rather than nudity – contemporary adults undressed. That’s what struck me first and foremost, immediately, and still does.’ 48 The critic John Berger put it another way in 1953, ‘Bacon paints crime … as though he were an accomplice.’ 49 The London art scene at this time was small and the relationship to in flux. The West End galleries were full, as the artist and critic put it, with ‘the last dregs of neo-romanticism, decorative painting that exploited the nature imagery of [Graham] Sutherland, and every imaginable variant of a decadent synthetic cubism’.50 A respected artist, , had moved from beautiful life paintings of his wife, Wendy, and a close relationship with other Euston Road School tutors, to abstraction, via a painting of a snow scene as a spiral in monochrome, shown Building Site, Earl’s Court Road, Winter, 1953 at the 1951 Festival of Britain, before exhibiting his first abstract reliefs in

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1953. When Bomberg’s contract with the Borough Polytechnic ended in 1953 artist friends he made. Among these were painters Auerbach admired, such he asked Coldstream whether there were any vacancies at the Slade, remind- as the talented, instinctive Gerald Wilde, a regular at the Fitzroy, a bohe- ing him that his own approach to drawing aimed at ‘a fuller and more mian pub in Charlotte Street.54 expansive delineation in the representation which is structural, taking no In January 1947, Stella’s husband, Dr Michael West, who had recently account of appearances’, and thus closer to Cézanne and Michelangelo, who begun work at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, drowned in a tragic accident were ‘builders of form’, in opposition to the more usual representational in the Serpentine when he was walking home one night after a black-tie art that was imitative and superficial.51 One hears an echo in Auerbach’s dinner. The 30-year-old Stella was left mother to two small daughters, Sarah words of 1958: ‘My attitude to form is conditioned, often, by an interest in and Julia, and pregnant with her son, Michael, born that October. Stella’s the exact distribution of weight rather than in an exactitude of shape, in beauty is evident in photographs; her broad forehead and slightly slanted the true inflections of the masses in space rather than in the associations mouth transfers to Auerbach’s first drawings of her made in the early 1950s. of particular colours or arrangements.’ 52 Her friends urged her to get out a bit, so she joined a drama group, and this is how she came to be playing Madame Barinova, the frail Russian land- E.O.W. in Earl’s Court, 1948–60 lady in the 1948 production of Ustinov’s play, set in West Kensington. As From the beginning of his time as a student, Auerbach was involved with Stella told it, she became aware of Frank’s attention soon after this, during Stella West (1916–2014), who he had met when they were both in Ustinov’s an evening gathering of friends at her house. She was sitting on the sofa, House of Regrets. Stella described the much younger man she met in 1948 as wearing a fashionable off-the-shoulder blouse and a billowing bell skirt with a driven person looking more mature than his years. ‘Frank always knew a pattern of brown and green rings. Frank moved over and began removing best, knew more.’ Auerbach has said similar things in connection with hairpins until her abundant hair cascaded down. his ambition as a painter: ‘I was born old and I wanted to make a great Stella lived in a rather tall, thin, elegant house at 81 Earl’s Court Road dignified perverse image, a formal image.’ After talking to Stella for more and as a widow was obliged to rent out rooms. Frank became a lodger in her than an hour at her home in Malvern in 1986, Robert Hughes coaxed some basement and their relationship began a week later; soon he also became deeper recollections from her: ‘I haven’t stressed enough that Frank was the part of the family, an unusual role to fall into for someone only 17. Stella most marvellous person at explaining things, as long as he wasn’t person- remembered him as being very poor: ‘he used to walk around with bread ally involved. He would have made a wonderful teacher. He always knew in his pocket, with sixpenny lunch tickets [or vouchers], and a rail pass.’ the answers. He always had an explanation which was unexpected, surpris- Nonetheless, he bought a black dog and hamsters for the children, and over ing, bizarre, but he hit the nail on the head, always. Sometimes, when a week in August 1949 he painted a long mural for the nursery: a fairground I was young, even though I was so much older, I regarded him as a sort of composition with the tent and acts described in cones and cylinders. ‘As father-figure.’ 53 time passes I realize that in a way – a formal way – everything I have done Stella thought of her childhood as difficult. She was the daughter of stems from that.’ The treatment of volumes and space is remarkably like a ‘gypsy’ mother and the philosopher O. S. Wauchope, noted for his book that of the paintings he started making at St Martin’s in 1950.55 Frank and Deviation into Sense: The Nature of Explanation, published by Faber and Faber Stella attended variety theatres – the Metropolitan, the Chelsea Palace, the in 1948. The book, indirectly imbued with an existential lack of emotional- Hackney Empire – together in the last years of these dying institutions and ity, is still read; its language is plain and its focus on ‘saying that is so’. His saw not only George Robey and Max Miller, but also upcoming stars such as theories strangely accorded with work from observation and measurement Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine. Her children were amused by Frank’s and other ideas current in the visual arts, including those held by several own very good impersonations.

46 47 Study for fairground mural, summer 1949, for the children’s nursery in Earl’s Court Road Chapter One

In the years c. 1949–51, Stella sat for a few casual studies, one a head-and- shoulders portrait when she wore a favourite dark red corduroy house-coat. Using the room in the basement had its problems; some of the lodgers were always coming down and asking for things. Perhaps the most troublesome was the writer Len Deighton who helped himself to coal without asking and cooked smelly eels on the stove. In late 1950, Auerbach moved out and began the custom of spending Friday, Saturday and Monday nights with Stella, working from her three evenings a week. The routine was for Stella to return from her job as a social worker in the East End, put food in the oven, persuade the children to be quiet for a bit, and to start posing. They began first with an hour, with a five-minute break to see how the meal was coming on, followed by another hour. The sitting over, they would eat. After she began posing nude, Stella became aware of the seriousness and the effort required. In the full-length ‘breakthrough’ painting of 1952, discussed earlier, which hung in her house for many years, she was comfort- able with a Rubens-like quality in the body, but embarrassed by her legs. Auerbach, thinking back in 2012, recalled the circumstances of painting Stella for many years: ‘Every single one of the paintings of Stella, totally without exception, was done with me on my knees, with the painting resting on a very, very paint-y chair, and with Stella sitting for a very long period of time.’ In Earl’s Court Road, Stella would either sit in an easy chair on one side of the fireplace or lie on a bed, with the pots of paint around Frank (after he moved out the paint had to be ‘lugged’ over from where he lived). Newspaper was spread on the floor to stop the paint getting all over, ‘but it was still a pretty messy procedure and she was very tolerant for it to be allowed. After I had been drawing Stella in charcoal she put an embargo on charcoal because the whole house was covered in charcoal dust.’ Stella remembered that ‘he was very violent and quite in a world of his own, and it was quite frightening in the beginning. But I got used to it after a time.’ 56 Frank’s recollections focus on the struggle to achieve an image, referring to the years 1952–58 when he could only afford earth colours and black and white, and was reluctant to scrape off expensive pigment and loose passages that worked: ‘It may be that the reiteration of the effort and the fact that I could afford so little material played some small part in the look … the thickness of the paint.’ E.O.W., Half-length Nude, 1958

50 Finding a Home in England

Auerbach left the Royal College in the summer of 1955 with its degree, Associate of the Royal College of Art, with first-class honours, and a silver medal for painting. In the last term, a younger student from Yorkshire, Julia Wolstenholme, who had seen his drawings and thought them marvellous, asked if she could buy one. She went along to where he lived to have a look. She later recalled ‘it was pretty clear that would be all right and he’d give it to me, and he did’. The two became involved and married not long before their son Jacob was born in March 1958 in Sheffield. Mother and son lived on Vincent Terrace in Islington, and working there one night a week Frank finished two drawings of Julia in 1960 (see p. 88). However, shortly after that they were no longer in regular contact, until they got together again in 1976.

Head of E.O.W., 1955

53